44 WEATHER Augmented Reality
also offers the Unreal Marketplace, which allows users to buy and sell assets – including plug-ins, effects, textures and animations – that can all be used in the software. But Unreal Engine is being adopted throughout the content creation world, and has become a go-to toolset for real-time applications in broadcast, as well as AR and VR, where virtual elements need to interact with humans in real time. In fact, Unreal Engine garnered Epic Games a 2017-2018 Technology and Engineering Emmy, for 3D Engine Software for the Production of Animation. Last year, to take its weather coverage to the next stage, The Weather Channel partnered with Norwegian visual effects company The Future Group, who are using Unreal Engine to produce high end live effects. The Future Group was formed in Oslo by experienced digital effects artists who saw the potential for sophisticated real-time effects. “The real-time space had a lot more innovation around it than traditional visual effects did,” says The Future Group’s CCO Øystein Larsen. One of the first big projects for The Future Group was a 2017 game show for Norwegian television called Lost In Time . Developed in partnership with Fremantle, the show featured an interactive component. It featured heavy use of Unreal Engine, with contestants completing tasks in exotic virtual environments and the ability for the audience to play against the contestants via mobile devices. The Future Group’s experience on that show went into the development of new
LIKE YOU’RE REALLY THERE... “We make sure we have all the logic in the scene, and that can be triggered by the director in real time”
THE REAL-TIME SPACE HAD MORE INNOVATION AROUND IT THANTRADITIONALVISUALEFFECTS DID
technology, which the company evolved into products for augmented reality productions. The first was a platform called Frontier. It was built on top of the Unreal Engine, and offered the ability to input video and tracking data for real-time interactivity for broadcast. “We started working on a lot of larger scale projects, and one of the first ones we did was for The Weather Channel,” says Larsen. “They had been doing quite a bit of augmented reality work before, but they were hitting the wall with the version of the software they had been using. “The Weather Channel had very clear ideas about the story they wanted to tell. It was boarded out and we created all the graphics in a very traditional way, using
3D software. You don’t author your actual assets in the Unreal Engine – those are all made outside the Engine, then you can bring them in and place them, change materials, add lighting. After that, we make sure we have all the logic in the scene – a car falling out of the sky or a lightning strike – and that can be triggered by the director in real time.” The Future Group’s Frontier platform evolved, incorporating what the company has learned so far about live effects, emerging as Pixotope, a virtual production system geared for creating virtual studios, augmented reality and on-air graphics. The Weather Channel is now using Pixotope as the engine for all its augmented reality reporting. Pixotope makes it easy to import a variety of data using the open source framework Node Red, which allows users to connect to all types of live data. Multiple data sources can be fed into Pixotope and used to drive animations. The Weather Channel has its own artists working internally on the company’s graphics content. These are responsible for the storyboarding, laying out the graphics, and detailing how the scene looks. In the early months of their partnership, The Future Group took over the technical implementations, including the animation and finishing, and setting up the scenes on set. Soon enough, however, The Weather Channel was paddling away on the flood waters all by itself.
WALL OF WATER These immersive graphics really help tell the story of what people on the ground at these extreme events experience
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